In the midst of increasing patent prosecution workload, Perkins Coie's intellectual property practice faced a tricky challenge: effectively managing its vast amount of patent portfolios without getting lost in the data.

“When you're dealing with hundreds of different activities that are going through for a large client portfolio, it's really important to have a way of staying on top of that, especially since the data comes from so many different systems,” said Rick Howell, chief information officer at Perkins Coie.

So Perkins Coie turned to technology, commissioning legal tech service provider Elevate services to develop a proprietary “Patent Prosecution Platform” that the firm launched in-house in spring 2017. Based off of Elevate Services' Cael Project Management technology, the platform essentially aims to bring project management to the unwieldy area of patent prosecution.

But the Patent Prosecution Platform is not your average project management tool. When managing patent portfolios, “what you're going to need is a different form of project management, one that is a bit more novel,” said Pratik Patel, vice president of legal business solutions at Elevate Services. He explained that such a platform had to handle “high volumes of rapidly moving portfolios,” in addition to constantly pulling data “from a variety of different sources.”

Therefore, Elevate designed Patent Prosecution Platform to integrate with several of Perkin Coie's “disparate systems, from docketing where we keep case information, to matter management information, to time and finance data,” Howell said. The platform then consolidated these systems into a “simple-to-use dashboard that allows lawyers to quickly filter and see all pertinent dates, where they are against the budget, what the priorities are for the next 30, 60 or 90 days, and what they need to focus on.”

In addition, the platform interface was configured to send alerts to users and show them a red, yellow or green light depending on a task's priority. Such functions are based off of predefined rules for what task should be prioritized among others.

For Perkins Coie, however, the Patent Prosecution Platform is as much about as allowing the firm to better manage and arrange its patent prosecution work as it is about meeting client expectations.

The platform addresses a “primary client concern,” Howell said, “which is [clients] need to know where we are with our anticipated spend rate and what patent activities are due, when are they due and what the client needs to help with.”

What's more, by automating a once-laborious process that entailed manually extracting data from different repositories systems and filing it onto spreadsheets, the firm now frees its staff up to “spend more time doing client work and delivering innovations in a way that is important for the client,” he added.

Eventually, Perkins Coie hopes to update the platform with a client-facing interface that gives clients direct access to information about their patent statuses. But for now, the firm still has to provide manual updates to its clients.

Of course, just having the platform does not ensure that Perkins Coie's patent operations will run smoothly. Like any legal technology, the platform's usefulness often depends on the integrity of data it ingests. And for the Patent Prosecution Platform, there were some challenges in making sure the data was up to par.

Patel noted that, when connecting the platform with the law firm's disparate systems, there was the challenge of “tying the docket data to the time data. So, right now the way timekeepers track their time is based on a coding system, and that coding system doesn't always ideally relate to the actual activities.”

So Elevate built proprietary algorithms that could identify “ the descriptive and narrative” content data in the docketing system, as well as determine “the date the narrative was tracked. From there, it combined all information to get a more accurate time measurement.”

But such data was still not completely reliable. “It's not perfect, it's not 100 percent science, and that's where the humans augment the machines,” Patel said. So, while Perkins reached a new height of automation, it is not complete automation.

Yet, overall, the Patent Prosecution Platform has provided financial benefits for the firm. It is, after all, a vital way for the firm to stay profitable as clients increasingly demand fixed fees for patent prosecution work.

“Law firms have a tremendous burden not only to track the work, but to track if they're profitable on their work because they have to manage it on a fixed budget,” Patel said.

And, as fixed fees become more common in the legal industry, Elevate Services is opening up the Patent Prosecution Platform to other law firms.

“We officially released the platform to other firms late last year, so it became available in 2017,” Patel said. “We now have three other firms piloting or about to pilot; they are in their final integration process.”